I have always loved the writing of the person I only know as SC, or Salty Current. Intelligent, emotional, well-crafted in prose and in poetry, her writing is always worth the reading (and always far more poetic than mine; I am far too chained to rhyme and meter, and SC is one of the few who makes me regret that). So I’ll direct you here, to a recent poem she quite incorrectly predicted I would hate. And then I’ll cheat a bit, and quote a separate poem, linked at the above, also written for National Poetry Week, and which I just absolutely love:

In my continued observance of National Poetry Month, I present for your amusement and edification a verse by reader Callinectes, which I find wonderfully illustrates a problem that a lot of my students have. Of course, it does so by way of metaphor:

In the land of Pyrûn, an exporter of lead
Ruled by a king (who’s extremely inbred)
Homeland of giants, but the giants are dead
So the towns are beset by a dragon instead

You can only burn down and eat all a man’s stuff
So many times before he’ll say, “Enough!
It’s time for the dragon to see that we’re tough,
Our knight will extinguish that piteous Puff!”

So out rode their champion, in gleaming steel armour
Bearing his shield with its heraldic llama
To be the right hand of the force they call Karma
(At this point it’s safe to assume there’ll be drama)

I’m more of an essayist, but I once (possibly) invented the Hairimeraku.
There are essays explaining the structure and the necessity of them fulfilling “both the exacting requirements of the Japanese haiku, and the even more exacting requirements of the Irish limerick… the best of them having both seasonal and salacious aspects as befits their combined ancestry” here and here, but I’ll add the verse here to save you the disappointment of visiting my site.

I’d visit anyway–it’s actually a pretty cool story of the invention of the verse… but since he added them, here they are: [Read more…]

It is, as I said earlier, National Poetry Month (here in the US, anyway). I am very happy to present my first guest poet, Kate Jones:

The two appended pieces were originally created for the bi-annual Gathering for Gardner (honoring Martin Gardner) in 2010 and 2012, the 9th and 10th such congresses of writers, thinkers, mathematicians, magicians, scientists and philosophers (and occasional rabble like me). I have presented these two pieces in various modified forms at other venues. The current embodiments have stripped all illustrations, leaving the essential text. Should you be curious to see the decorated editions, they are here:

I strongly urge you to visit–while I love these poems in the stripped down version below, it is even better to see them as originally envisioned–my own verses are only very rarely accompanied by any sort of visual… anything. It makes a difference; I am going to have to learn from this Kate.

For those too stubborn to click the links and see the poems as originally intended, the bare versions are after the jump: [Read more…]